After appearing on BBC's Watchdog, Samsung has said it will look to address the storage issues surrounding its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone.

Samsung will try and free up Galaxy S4 storage with software optimisation

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After appearing on BBC's Watchdog, Samsung has said it will look to address the storage issues surrounding its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone.

In what has become something of a scandal, Samsung will try to fit its Galaxy S4 software features into a smaller amount of space. The Android smartphone has received complaints by users and in reviews for its lack of storage. See also: Samsung Galaxy S4 suffers from storage woes.

The 16GB model has nearly half of the internal memory used up with the Android operating system, Samsung's TouchWiz interface and the firm's extra features such as S Translator and S Health. There's no option to uninstall unwanted features.

"We appreciate this issue being raised and we will improve our communications," Samsung told CNET. "Also, we are reviewing the possibility to secure more memory space through further software optimisation."

"Samsung is committed to listening to our customers and responding to their needs as part of our innovation process."

The Korean tech giant stood by its decision to use the space saying it gave users "more powerful features". However, we've found a lot of them to be gimmicky and buggy. See: Best Samsung Galaxy S4 contract deals.

The Galaxy S4 does have a microSD card slot for adding more storage, something many of its rivals do no offer. But this can't be used for installing apps, putting users in a tricky position.

At Google's I/O conference this week, a 'Google Edition' of the Galaxy S4 was announced with stock Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. We're keen to see how much storage this has available in comparison.

Let us you what you think about the situation in the comments below. Should manufactures be forced to state how much storage is actually available on the box?

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Comments

Peter Andrijeczko said: Comments,Peter Andrijeczko,I got an S4 today as an upgrade, having been very pleased with the S3. Yes, it is full of crap apps, which is why I will simply root it and remove what I don't want. When there's a Cyanogenmod ROM available for the UK version of the phone (only US currently), I will be installing that, like I have on three other phones and a tablet.
I'm sorry but if you're not prepared to spend a little time and educate yourself about how to customise computing devices to your own requirements then you have only yourselves to blame - in most cases it is relatively straightforward to do with little chance of breaking the device, and there are plenty of web sites and videos on YouTube showing you how to do it.
If you expect a company to behave responsibly off its own back and deliver exactly what you need then you are a fool. The apps are there to make more money because that is what the shareholders demand the company does.
So time to stop whining and spend some time learning how to customise these things to your need - and be a happy camper like me! :-)

Matthew Armstrong said: Comments,Matthew Armstrong,Yeah its bad that its advertised as a 16gb device but u can only use half... but in comparison I used to have a sony xperia neo that only had 320mb of internal storage, it wasn't comfortable but I managed. I can happily live with 9GB of internal storage because I can never imagine using that much, I download relatively small apps, aside from a couple of large games and some smaller ones. Yeah you cant move apps to the memory card anymore but its made them a lot more stable and stops crashing as much, also whos going to fill 64gb worth of pictures movies and songs on a mobile phone? 64gb worth of apps is even more ridiculous it would run down the processor and RAM just by displaying them on the screen. So the smallest option out of the 16, 32 and 64GB may be the best way forward. However if they are looking to improve the issue via updated software then it could be fixed reasonably well. Tbh when I first got the phone I did disable a majority of the preinstalled rubbish that you get... even the smart scroll and smart pause and motion control that was hyped up so much in the advertisments don't work very well although they do work if you really sit and mess around with it

Tony P said: Comments,Tony P,One would expect usable space to be at least more than 80% of advertised space... This is misleading on Samsung's part! I'd return my phone!

Mike said: Comments,Mike,"With a 500GB drive, formatted NTFS with 32K clusters and no waste reservation, I have a usable space of 465GB."
Indeed. You knew exactly what I meant.

jusskoll said: Comments,jusskoll,What you mean new "empty" drives?
The capacities listed on HDD's are the absolute number of bytes available on a drive. For instance, a 4GB drive would have 4,000,000,000 bytes of space available on the disk. The problem is that PCs use factors of 2 for everything. As it turns out, the computer does not use groups of 1000 to store data, it uses groups of 1024 (2^10). Take 4,000,000,000 and divide it by 1024 bytes and you actually get a number of 3.906GB instead of 4.000GB. If you have a 160GB hard disk, it'd actually be 156GB before it's formatted. Then once it's formatted, you've lost some more due to much more complex issues to discuss like partition tables, cluster size, reserved space, and the like.With a 500GB drive, formatted NTFS with 32K clusters and no waste reservation, I have a usable space of 465GB.

Mike said: Comments,Mike,Of course manufacturers should be required to state the storage space ex factory actually available for owners' use. But Samsung aren't alone here. Apple's iPhone is the same - it's just Samsung's overlay uses up even more on the S4. But every computing device supplied with software/apps has the same issue. Even new "empty" drives do, we all know this. At least the S4 has a card slot to add more (non-app) space.
Watchdog are hyping up a non-story.